Job outlook for hardware engineers in the United States

What Hardware Engineer skills would you recommend for someone trying to advance their career?

Steven Schennum Ph.D. P.E.: The most important skill is the ability to learn new things, and especially to unlearn things you “know” after evidence demonstrates that these things are not true. Learn how to analyze information. Your intuition, simulations, and results should all be in alignment. If they are not, then dig deeper. Learn the terminology and jargon specific to your company and your projects. Spend time reading. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be intimidated by new software.

What Hardware Engineer skills would you recommend for someone trying to advance their career?

Min Song: Communication skills and innovative thinking skills. As emerging technologies continue to be complex and multidisciplinary, it’s important to be able to communicate with professionals in diverse disciplines. Taking robotics, for example, the electrical engineer must be able to work with mechanical and biomechanical engineers, computer engineers, software engineers, artificial intelligence experts, cognitive scientists, system engineers, etc. A person will be able to generate innovative ideas only if the person has a complete and comprehensive understanding of the entire system and can work well with other individuals with a range of expertise.

What general advice would you give to a Hardware Engineer?

Megumi Usui: Many individuals aspire to earn a substantial salary right from the beginning of their careers. However, this is not typically how the professional world operates. it is essential to demonstrate to your employer that you are a skilled, valuable, and irreplaceable asset. This process takes time and dedication. Avoid pressuring your employer for immediate rewards based solely on self-perception. While family may view you as exceptional, in the professional realm, you must distinguish yourself through your actions. Prove your worth by consistently arriving on time, working diligently, completing tasks swiftly and accurately, and exceeding expectations. Take a proactive approach to your projects and strive to impress your employer in every conceivable way. Continuously acquiring new skills that are valuable to the company is crucial. Additionally, building a strong network within your field by making professional connections and fostering friendships can significantly enhance your career prospects. By embodying these qualities, you can effectively demonstrate your value and potentially achieve the financial and professional rewards you seek.

What Hardware Engineer skills would you recommend for someone trying to advance their career?

Arie Nakhmani: Electrical Engineering has always (from its inception) been a good profession to enter, but now it is better than ever. Now everything is becoming Electrical Engineering, and the world cannot survive without it even for a few days. Electrical Engineering is the most necessary profession for the survival of modern society.

What will help Hardware Engineers increase their earning potential?

Arie Nakhmani: People who have EE degrees like being able to choose from a variety of EE sub-fields and being able to enter new areas because they learn science fundamentals and math, critical thinking, and the ability to solve difficult problems that are very helpful in life regardless of the job they pick. People dislike that solving difficult problems is difficult and requires a lot of effort. Not all are ready to put their effort in.

What will help Hardware Engineers increase their earning potential?

Dr. Arif Engin: Electrical engineers solve problems by skillfully applying mathematics and science. Electrical engineering classes are challenging at college, and electrical engineers must embrace lifelong learning to remain at the top of their skills. In the end, seeing the results of their work in a finished product is a rewarding experience.

What will help Hardware Engineers increase their earning potential?

Mahmoud Manzoul: Maximizing salary potential hinges on thorough preparation during college. I cannot stress enough the importance of securing internships before completing your degree. Internships not only facilitate networking with seasoned engineers but also foster the development of essential soft skills crucial for professional success.

What hard/technical skills are most important for Hardware Engineers?

Florian Solzbacher: First of all, the fundamentals (mostly math, physics, materials/chemistry) and basic EE/CE concepts need to be solid. As stated above: the ability to solve real-world development and system integration problems that require "global optimization" of technical performance as opposed to local optimization of specific sub-systems or components is really critical.


Beyond that, given the accelerating breadth of specializations and sub-areas, it is important that students have sufficient depth and breadth of knowledge in the specific area they are targeting. It is important that schools are offering tracks and guidance as to what skills are needed to allow students to successfully master engineering tasks across a range of sub-areas. We have to recognize that in the context of a 4-year program, it is no longer possible to train a student in all areas of ECE - a combined BS/MS degree or MS/Ph.D. degree obviously provides more runway to add breadth.

What experience really stands out on Hardware Engineer resumes?

John Chandy Ph.D.: Obviously, experience that is most relevant to the job is what will stand out the most. An internship that allow students to do actual engineering design is attractive since it shows that students are familiar with the industry work environment. In-school experiences can include working in a research lab and participating in technical clubs (like IEEE or ACM). Use the resume to highlight interesting projects that may have done in various classes. Try to get experience in a variety of areas - software, hardware, networking, etc. Even if you don't have an internship or research experience in some of these areas, the nature of computer engineering is that you can always do things on your own - contribute to a open-source software, build something using an Arduino or Raspberry Pi.

What type of skills will young Hardware Engineers need?

John Chandy Ph.D.: I don't think my answer to this question would be any different to what I may have answered a decade ago. The technical skills that they acquire as a student will establish their qualifications to do the work. That means understanding the fundamentals of computer engineering hardware and software as well as more advanced training in specific areas of interest. However, to be truly effective in a company, they need to be able to communicate (both orally and in written form) and they need to show that they can work in a team. Most modern engineering systems will often require a computer engineer to design the control/compute interface and that often requires that the computer engineer be able to understand the language of electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, and computer scientists. Finally, computer engineering is a fast-moving field, and new graduates should be prepared to continuously learn new technologies and approaches.

Will there be an enduring impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Hardware Engineers?

Michel Audette Ph.D.: My take on this is what I've seen with my wife's work in industry, which suggests that the industrial landscape is going to be increasingly equipped for, and open to, remote work. I think that the implication for graduates is that they may need to be flexible about working within a geographically distributed team. If company deciders feel that someone is worth employing because of a unique skill set, then they would typically be more willing to hire that person even if unable to make it to work regularly, if that is feasible given the nature of the work; some work, such as hardware testing or industrial production, may not lend itself to remote contributions.

Nonetheless, for those areas that accommodate geographically distributed activity, such as software development, graduates can expect to interact with team members all over the US, possibly all over the world, if someone is deemed unique enough to hire despite living abroad. This places a high premium on the ability and willingness to work in a heterogeneous team, where not only will members look different, but also have myriad accents in their English, which will also impose a certain adaptability and tolerance to team members.

A related impact could also be that global hiring will make it easier for multi-national companies to hire a portion of their talent in countries where wages are lower and motivate US-based engineers to seek out graduate degrees in order to increase their competitiveness and employability at US salaries.

What type of skills will young Hardware Engineers need?

Michel Audette Ph.D.: One skill that is timeless is the ability to communicate effectively, such as taking a complex design process and distilling it into intuitive slides or reports that lend themselves for senior managers to process in order to come to a decision. An engineer who has that ability will always have some tools in his/her toolbox that makes that individual attractive to a company and to the local technical ecosystem, thus a ripe target for headhunters who willing to champion them to companies looking for top talent. Moreover, speaking and writing well also comes with a vital component of diplomacy, especially in the context of increasingly distributed company workforce: the ability not just to get on with colleagues from different parts of the world, increasingly heterogeneous in terms of gender and possibly sexual preference, but embrace them for who they are. This is often maps to opportunities to travel, as some collaborations lead to meetings face to face, post-covid.

This embrace of heterogeneity is even more relevant in that technical problems being solved are increasingly multi-disciplinary, so that an engineer may need to interact with biologists, physicians, clothing or furniture designers, mathematicians, lawyers, and so on: in my own case, I have to wear a multitude of different hats, while recognizing someone who is a perfect fit for one of those hats when I meet that individual, and making the most of that opportunity to build a truly competent team. Engineers must be able to hold a meaningful, respectful conversation with any of these counterparts, not just discuss code or circuit design. I would advocate that they spend time reading, to maintain their vocabulary and stay abreast of the world around them.

Another one that I advocate is the ability to tap into a revolution that has occurred in parallel with the advent of Internet and cellular technologies, these past 30+ years: the explosion of open-source software tools. I am a committed proponent of open source, as a former contributor to them while previously employed at Kitware (a pioneer in this area, behind VTK, ITK, CMake, and myriad others). I see job ads in Indeed.com that specifically ask for the ability to work with these tools, since they save work and make it possible to produce a prototype in much less time than developing it completely in-house. This ability does not just presuppose the ability to program at a competent level, but other abilities: the ability to track bugs that not be in the calling program, but in the open-source software library itself, the willingness to get answers in the community of developers, the eye for details that extends to graphical processor units that result in accelerations an order of magnitude or better, and so on. These go way beyond writing a self-contained algorithm. Hardware designers may also have similar tools, based on broad standards, Arduino, and the prevalence of 3D printers that make it possible to physically replicate digital models.

Finally, a vital skill is the willingness and ability to keep learning, while embracing revolutions that take place at breathtaking pace. The latest one is the reliance on deep neural networks (DNNs) to synthesize algorithms that can learn and adapt to their data, with much faster performances than feasible with the previous algorithms that DNNs have replaced. The point to make here is not to embrace neural networks in a proximal sense, but that we cannot anticipate what will come next, downstream of DNNs. Graduates of 2021 have to be willing to keep their curiosity and work ethic enough to be responsive to the next wave of technologies, and embrace them for the opportunities that they represent.

Will there be an enduring impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Hardware Engineers?

Maria Jacob: Well, this is a somewhat difficult question, since it's hard to predict what is going to happen.
Given the current research, everything seems to indicate that even with the vaccine, we won't be able to come back to what we were used to for a long time.
This will mean, work and classes from home for some time. Although I see and enjoy some of the advantages of staying at home (that go from clothing to saving money on gas), I feel we are losing some of the human contact we were used to. Of course, we have software like Zoom or Meet that helps us to communicate with others, but this virtuality is just simply different. For example, some students do just fine, and others can't deal with the fact that they have to write their questions over a chat. More than that, some students have family making everything more difficult.
There are other aspects that also impact the knowledge the new graduates have at the time of start working. For example, we as professors also have to take into account that we are living special circumstances and that some students may find this new system more difficult. Then, sometimes is easy to overcompensate and be more lenient with some things. If we are not careful this could lead to students graduating having less knowledge in some topics, where students pass a class not knowing certain topics that they should.

What technology do you think will become more important and prevalent for Hardware Engineers in the next 3-5 years?

Michael Rudisill: Impossible to pick a technology - but in general, renewable energies, electric cars; in that area, will undoubtedly continue to grow. And even with some public resistance, I think we will continue to see more expert systems, artificial intelligence systems, etc.; everywhere from self-driving cars to security systems.

How do you envision technology impacting Hardware Engineers in the next 5 years?

Dr. John Daigle Ph.D.: Starting with automatic speech recognition and leading to biometrics in identifications/verifications of people and self-driving autonomous vehicles in the near future, artificial intelligence/machine learning continues to play a big role in the development of our society and our thinking with respect to ethics and safety. Additionally, wireless access to information and entertainment and connectivity for data-intensive applications in IoT and industrial IoT would skyrocket with emerging 5G and future technologies. Tomorrow's electrical engineers would work in interdisciplinary teams that would increasingly involve mechanical and biomedical engineers and computer scientists.

Will there be an enduring impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Hardware Engineers?

Hai Ho Ph.D.: I believe the impact is short term, and once vaccines are effective and available, our graduates will have expected graduation and access to a responsive job market.

How do you envision technology impacting Hardware Engineers in the next 5 years?

Hai Ho Ph.D.: We are heading into the so-called fourth industrial revolution with blossoming technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, mixed reality, etc. Therefore, this field will experience tremendous growth and opportunities.

What are the biggest trends we'll see in the Hardware Engineer job market given the pandemic?

Aaron Ohta Ph.D.: I think the EE job market will be relatively stable in the near future. There are many areas that continue to need electrical engineers right now. Obvious examples are companies that help with communication, such as video chats. Our recent graduates are not having problems getting jobs, and I don't think that employment will be a problem for electrical engineers, even with the impacts of COVID-19. Of course, if any electrical engineers are having difficulties entering the job market, now would be a great time to go back to school to get a graduate degree. Universities typically see enrollments rise when the job market is poor, as it makes sense to learn new skills and earn more degrees to make yourself more marketable, once the job market improves.

What Hardware Engineer skills would you recommend for someone trying to advance their career?

Dr. Kip Haggerty: In many industries, working competently with both hardware and software is a highly desirable EE skill.
With more remote work, the following soft skills increase in importance:

1. Summarizing complex issues and technology concisely in your own words in writing, speaking, and presentations.


2. Supporting good relations with team members on impersonal electronic communications by using tact, grace, empathy, patience, and self-control.


3. Presenting designs and results emphasizing clear assertions supported by pictorial evidence, rather than a sea of bullet points. Bad presentations are much worse when seen over web conferencing.

What Hardware Engineer skills would you recommend for someone trying to advance their career?

Robert Saunders P.E.: Project management and/or leadership training, either at the university they graduated from, or a good online source. Either or both of these would demonstrate the proactive attitude of the student. And get involved in something; community service groups, design a project, anything that shows you are pushing forward professionally and personally, not just sitting at home.